Status and Drivers of the Arctic Surface Energy Fluxes at Pan-Arctic Scale – a Synthesis

Abstract:

The terrestrial Arctic is undergoing rapid climatic changes including strong temperature increases and severe changes in precipitation patterns. At the heart of these developments lie changes in the Arctic land surface energy budget (SEB), which couples important earth system processes including the carbon and water cycles. However, despite the importance of the SEB, knowledge on its status and future development in the Arctic is scattered and outdated.

Therefore, we update the current knowledge on the terrestrial Arctic SEB by synthesizing results from a systematic literature search and published in situ data. We specifically focus on the understudied effects of tundra vegetation types on the seasonal change in SEB-components, SEB-partitioning across the pan-Arctic region, and on the importance of vegetation type as a driver of the SEB compared to other drivers including soil type, annual precipitation, and cloud cover. We further identify knowledge-gaps and uncertainties of current SEB-estimates and suggest ways to advance Arctic SEB-research in the future.

Our analyses show that the magnitude and temporal change of SEB-components depend on a variety of drivers, of which tundra vegetation type is relatively important. Furthermore, we find that future studies should aim at longer-term, year-round in situ measurements and analyses of SEBs, especially for to-date underrepresented tundra vegetation types and in the to-date sparsely-covered Arctic regions of Eastern Canada and Western Russia.

These findings contribute to improving the predictions of dynamic vegetation, land surface and climate models in a region that faces rapid environmental changes, which have the potential to affect the earth system not only at the local but also at the global scale.